


Three

by quigonejinn



Category: Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-18
Updated: 2013-04-18
Packaged: 2017-12-08 19:58:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/765381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quigonejinn/pseuds/quigonejinn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Howard Stark is on honeymoon.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Three

**Author's Note:**

> Previously posted to [tumblr](http://quigonejinn.tumblr.com/post/32261693663/5-howard-peggy-sorry-sorry-sorry) in response to a prompt by [destronomics](http://archiveofourown.org/users/destronomics).

Howard Stark is on honeymoon. A full moon shines down on the mountains, the lake, the arbor covered by nice-smelling vines. Three men and a woman sit at a table, and the woman leans forward, speaking in prettily-accented German -- schoolgirl German, bearing the hints of boarding school education overlaid on a family accent that traces to maybe Bavaria? A little old-fashioned, certainly. German isn’t spoken much in England anymore, and she talks charmingly about her father’s admiration for the Fuhrer, about how her mother had cried and cried and cried when she saw the pictures from the bunker of that beautiful -- of that wonderful family-- 

Here, she turns to Howard Stark for confirmation, and he smiles, lazily, a little contentedly. He reaches over and pats her hand, then leans back in his chair and goes on smoking. Howard Stark is a rich man, a contented man, a man on his honeymoon. Every once in a while, Howard nods and makes an approving noise when the girl says something particularly right about racial policy, and she goes on talking prettily, happily. There is a diamond the size of something very, very large winking on her left hand, and she pauses to admire it every now and then. Howard smiles indulgently. His German isn't as good as hers, and the men on the other side of the table look briefly at each other. They can read the situation as well as anyone, they believe. A rich, famous industrialist man with certain sympathies, certain talents, displeased at the treatment of men of his caliber after the war, marries a pretty, young wife with more than sympathies, and -- 

“Well?” Peggy says. 

Men are being led away in handcuffs down the side of the mountain. SSR staff are carefully loading confiscated scientific equipment onto trucks, and Peggy takes a deep breath of the clean air. It smells and tastes good after the recycled air in the underground complex, and it feels good, too, to come out after the blood and smoke and see that the moon is still on the side of the mountain and the water of the lake. 

“I didn’t know you were Jewish,” she says, finally. 

“We had other things to talk about during the war.” There’s a bruise on his face where one of the men hit him, and his lip is split. 

“And it just happened to come up after they tied you to a chair?” 

Howard shrugs and looks away, so Peggy reaches over and touches him, gently, on the cheekbone just below his bruised eye, then again just above the mouth. She should have put it together, she realizes. New York kid. Slightly amused, inside joke sounding references to the family business getting started down on the Lower East Side. No college, even though clearly more-than-enough bright for it and family money for generations. If the best colleges weren’t going to have him, fuck all colleges. It was a Howard Stark sort of thing to do, to say; it was how he ended up in the SSR lab floor without a single academic credential after high school. 

Peggy touches Howard’s hair. Had Steve known? Peggy never saw the full file on Howard, assumed it was because he had some kind of -- scandal in there, and Phillips was trying to protect her young maiden eyes. 

Then, Howard takes a step backwards. 

“What were those stories about your father goosestepping around the house and your mother crying over the dead Goebbels kids?” Howard says, after a moment. 

“They weren’t stories.”

Howard turns, looks at her sharply. He frowns; Peggy shrugs. 

She reaches into her pocket and gives him back the ring. 

…

Years later, Christine Everhart sits at a computer, writes three paragraphs, deletes them all manually using the backspace key, writes one paragraph, deletes that again, writes two sentences, then deletes those too. 

It is, she decides, too sentimental. Too projecting. She writes a paragraph on Tony Stark at MIT instead, how he had a choice of every college in the country from the time he was nine years old, but in the end, when he came home from boarding school in the summer, he did supplemental research at NYU. When he decided to go to college full-time, he chose MIT. Elite institutions all, yes, but schools that had never had a Jewish quota. Schools that had traditionally welcomed talented Jews, and there was now a wing at the engineering building at Columbia named after Howard Stark, a particle accelerator at Harvard named after him, too, but there was an old, old story, circulating in fundraising circles, that Howard Stark had refused to give a red cent, and had ordered the Stark Foundation to turn away applications from professors at Ivy League institutions, until the president of each University came, hat in hand, to apologize to Howard Stark. 

Still, the truths in the deleted paragraphs remain. Christine Everhart tracked them down, found them, pieced them together: the three great tragedies of Howard Stark’s life were that the war ended, that Peggy Carter never married him, and that his son was an enormous disappointment to him.


End file.
